*Home Use* - Outside Fiber Run from Garage to Loft

[Guest obsidianpillar]

Hi everyone,

 

Wondering if anyone here would be able to give me a few pointers on what exactly I'd need to achieve what I want here?!

 

Long story short is we're moving from Virgin Media to Sky. Virgin Media had installed the Coaxial for the (not so..) 'SuperHub' into the Loft, where we have our main TiVo box also.

 

With the move to Sky, we're wanting all equipment to be moved into the Garage where my existing 'HomeLab' equipment is. However, all of the Ethernet drops to all Rooms are terminated in the Loft, and therefore we're not going to move that. We currently have a UniFi 16-port Gigabit Switch installed which deals with all of this (in addition to our Main UniFi AP).

 

I'd like to connect the Core Switch (from the Garage) to the Loft. I am wondering if you'd recommend Fibre or Ethernet for this (given it's being used in a Home). The cable would have to be external, and would have a run of about 50 metres.

 

With regards to throughput, Gigabit would be fine at the minute; however in terms of future proofing the ability to have 10 Gigabit to the Core would be, somewhat beneficial (for bragging rights only! ). Evidently if I was to run a Cat 6a line between both, that would be able to 'handle' 10 Gigabit fine, however was unsure as to if any of you would recommend fiber for this use?

 

I'm aware the current UniFi 16-port Switch doesn't support SFP+ currently, but having the physical wiring in place may help eventually should I choose to upgrade to the 48-port model when I see one at a good price. I'm not at home all of the time, and the reason I keep referencing UniFi is that my Parents are able to manage it given it's 'dumb' interface (i.e learning UniFi is bespoke in itself and doesn't require a large amount of knowledge to get working).

 

Would be interested to hear everyone's thoughts!

 

Cheers.

 

Tom

[smarties11]

CAT6 is fine for up to 55m @ 10GbE, no need for 6A. The only time to consider fibre really is when you are beyond the distance limitations of cable, or if you need multicore. 50m of pre terminated 4-core fibre will cost you about 80-100 quid, plus you'll need the transceivers at either end too. Fibre would be a waste of money IMHO and give you no benefits Edited May 12, 2018 by smarties11

[forkies]

Why not run two cat 6 cables, then you can have 20gb on lag.

[SpuffMonkey]

I did similar with my install, and just bodged in a long bit of cat5 as a temporary measure - 17 years later its still working fine - it wasn't even outside cable!

[XiJ]

I’ve run cat6. The distance don’t require more - and I expect wireless advances will cover more of my devices at acceptable home use speeds in the future.

As it is a don’t have that many wired devices - my media centre is ‘cloud’ hosted elsewhere too.